The gas station guys are laughing. “No, I ain’t fucking wit’ you,” one says to another in a tone that indicates Of course I’m fucking with you but I’m too cool to admit it. The white men still debate basketball. “Rodman’s a showboat, man, bad for the game, ought to be banned from the league.” The voice says, Crazy nigger, I’d love to see him get what he deserves, but with a thrilled edge that also indicates, I love it when he’s bad, I wish I had the balls to be bad.
“So what broke the cycle for you?” I ask Reggie. “Your luck. What was it?”
“Books. In BCC a guy gave me Maya Angelou.”
I smile.
“W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. Elijah Muhammad’s Message to the Blackman in America. See, on the street, props had never been handed out for intellectual development. But in the system, where you had lots of time, some guys started using their minds, their imaginations. So the irony was, prison freed these fellows, let them pick in high cotton. Gave them power their white captors never intended them to have. I’m living proof of that.”
Reading ideologically.
“I hate to say it, but I’ve got to get back,” Ariyeh says, wiping her hands on a shredded napkin. A busboy swishes by, knocking crawfish shells from our table onto wet paper on the floor. He scoops the paper up and dunks it into a trash can. “Why don’t you go with Reggie to see the Row House Project, T? I think you’ll be impressed.”
I glance at her, then him. His energy makes me nervous.
Ariyeh senses my hesitation. “It’s an example of what can be done to salvage old black neighborhoods. It’s what ought to be happening in Freedmen’s Town. I think it’s something a city planner should see.”
“All right,” I say, falsely bright. “Lead the way.”
“No no, I disagree,” one of the big men says. “Michael Jordan earned every penny. I mean, the man wasn’t human. I swear he had wings in his butt — ”
Reggie leans their way. “The NBA throws an obscene amount of money at a few hundred brothers to compensate for the collective guilt you ofays feel, but you know what? There’s not enough money between here and Africa to ever atone for the lethal shit dumped on my people.”
The men tremble; tartar sauce greases their thumbs. The gas station gang hoots, bumping shoulders. Ariyeh tugs Reggie’s arm. He walks away without leaving a tip: we were owed whatever we could steal.
Outside the restaurant, he chuckles, pleased with himself. Clouds fat with seawater bubble up in the east, turning the afternoon light a pleasant blue-green. The passing traffic smells toasted: hot brakes, broiling metal. “I have to go back to school now and face dozens of frightened children, who wonder why their friends have disappeared. I don’t want to have to worry about you doing a ghost too,” Ariyeh tells Reggie.
“They’re all talk and blubber,” he says. “Living vicariously through black, athletic bodies. And hating them at the same time. Pathetic.”
She kisses him curtly on the cheek. “We’ll talk about it later.” She takes my hand. “I’ll drop by Bitter’s again soon. You’re staying a while longer?”
“A while.”
“Follow me,” Reggie says and steps into a red Honda. I wave goodbye to the woman I used to think was my cousin, back when I believed I knew my family, my home. My own true colors.
The Row House Restoration Project, twenty-two shotgun houses built in the twenties and thirties, braced, refurbished, repainted, occupies two city blocks on Alabama Street, ten minutes south of Freedmen’s Town. With local arts grants and a smattering of corporate support, Reggie has turned the abandoned homes into a series of galleries displaying the work of black, Chicano, Asian, and other minority artists. In one house, lining the floor, I find a collection of snapshots in canning jars. The artist’s statement explains that she distributed 150 disposable cameras at schools and churches in Houston’s blighted neighborhoods and asked kids to take pictures of whatever they wanted. She placed the results in over three thousand jars, beneath a banner that reads, “What will we choose to preserve?” The pictures show broken fire escapes, drug needles glinting in gravel parking lots, old people sleeping, undernourished babies.
In another house, life-sized cardboard figures stand, faceless, in the center of the room. Huddled against the walls, in shadow, cutouts of children. The artist hoped to dramatize the trauma of child abuse, she writes, by showing “something is horribly wrong in this house.”
A third artist has used her space to “celebrate pattern making, a tradition passed down through generations of African American families — using a variety of surfaces and materials to record events and thus claim our place in the universal order.” On the walls, torn newspaper strips covered with crayon drawings, elaborate maps made on napkins and cardboard boxes, photographs pinned to tapestries sewn out of bed-sheets. They remind me of my mama’s old quilts.
I’m delighted to see one of Kwako’s car-bumper birds perched on a porch. “I just met this guy,” I tell Reggie. Lunch still burns my mouth. “Yesterday. I drove to his museum.”
“Good man. One of Houston’s finest folk artists.” Sunlight and shade sculpt his face: crystalline brown panes. I understand what Ariyeh sees in him: dignity, pride, an impressive commitment to his community. But the arrogance! It doesn’t help that he reminds me of another beautiful young man in dreads, Dwayne Jefferson, a former coworker who fucked me over last year. These damned self-made men! Dont look back, Mama warned me when we abandoned our old life. But ever since — haven’t I longed for whatever’s off-limits? I vow to myself, for Ariyeh’s sake as well as my own, to keep a cool distance from Reggie.
The last house on the block is still being renovated. Its stripped walls smell of piney woods. Reggie warns me to be careful of the flooring — “Some of those planks are just splinters.” I stand in the little room, breathing in dust, the tinge of rusty nails, the imagined odors of muddy clothes, shoes, boiling potatoes, spit-up, and milk — the sweet and bitter smells of a cramped sharecropper life. And I wonder if my daddy, whoever he was, once lived in a room like this, huddled in candlelight on cold nights, running a pocketknife over rain-tightened strings, coaxing sad sounds out of the worn old wood.
“I’m amazed at what you’ve done here,” I tell Reggie. “Ariyeh was right. This is a model of good city planning.”
“I wanted to preserve history and our heritage and at the same time make it an active, living place, a resource for the people here — ”
“The neighborhood’s soul?”
He smiles at me, and I recall Dwayne’s roguish charm, remember the shut-in boy, all those years ago, staring at me from across a quiet room. “It’s been a political and financial nightmare, as you can imagine. But we’re holding our own for now. Come on. Let me walk you down to the office, show you what I’m proudest of.”
A rap song grunts from a passing car. The sun has turned the ground into a hard, baked crust. Reggie’s sweating lightly beside me. Yeasty, warm. As we walk, I move away from him, slightly. “So, Ariyeh was telling me. You’re here to find your daddy?”
“Not find him, exactly. He’s long gone, from what I can gather. But I wanted to hear from Bitter who he was. Who they all were. My family.”